Photo by CHARLIE DE KEERSMAECKER
After more than 20 years, the hardest thing for a rock band to recover isn’t necessarily its sound. It’s the hunger that made playing together necessary in the first place. On their sixth studio album TARMAC, Triggerfinger sound hungry again.
That matters because this isn’t an ordinary return. Following years spent pursuing separate projects, bassist Monsieur Paul Van Bruystegem left the band in 2023 before passing away in October 2025 after a period of ill health. For remaining members Ruben Block and Mario Goossens, continuing Triggerfinger therefore meant confronting a fundamental question: what does this band become when one of the people who helped define it is no longer there?
TARMAC doesn’t answer by attempting to recreate the past. Written and recorded between Antwerp and Los Angeles with assistance from Mitchell Froom, the album instead finds Block and Goossens taking Triggerfinger’s familiar ingredients, muscular guitars, tightly locked rhythms, swagger and instinctive hooks, while testing how far they can stretch them. The result feels recognisably theirs while carrying the restless energy of musicians unwilling to become their own tribute act.
That distinction is important for a group with this much history. From their 2004 self-titled debut through What Grabs Ya, All This Dancing Around, By Absence of the Sun and Colossus, Triggerfinger gradually transformed from fixtures of the European live circuit into one of Belgium’s most established rock exports. Their unlikely interpretation of Lykke Li’s ‘I Follow Rivers’ demonstrated that accessibility and rock credibility didn’t have to cancel one another out, while tours alongside acts including Muse, Placebo and The Rolling Stones reinforced a reputation built primarily through performance.
TARMAC takes that experience and removes some of the need to prove anything. There is still weight here, but heaviness isn’t treated as an obligation. Instead, the album’s most convincing moments come from the interaction between groove and economy. Block and Goossens understand one another well enough to know when a riff needs another layer and when it simply needs room. That restraint gives the record an immediacy that feels particularly suited to the stage.
And the stage remains central to understanding Triggerfinger. This has always been a band whose identity depends on the strange chemistry created when drums, guitars, bass and vocals suddenly lock together in front of an audience. After time apart, TARMAC feels powered by the desire to experience that exchange again.
There is inevitably loss behind this new chapter, but the record doesn’t allow grief to become its sole identity. Nor does Triggerfinger pretend nothing has changed. More than two decades of touring, side projects, departures and personal evolution have altered the musicians who originally began this journey.
Perhaps that’s why TARMAC feels less like an attempt to return home than a decision to keep driving. Triggerfinger aren’t trying to become the band they were in 2004 again. They’re discovering what happens when the musicians they are now rediscover the appetite that started everything.
Twenty years down the road, TARMAC suggests there are still plenty of miles left in them.
